Hunted Read Free Page A

the business meeting he was here in London to attend. Leaving him standing before Anna-Maria now in a jacket, black T-shirt and jeans, clean-shaven, with his hair cut short and neat.
    She took his hands, and slowly looked over his tanned, weathered face before gazing deep into his dark brown eyes.
    ‘God, I’ve missed you,’ she said.
    She said it in French, her native tongue, an occasional habit of hers when they were alone, and one that Danny encouraged. He was already fluent. A sliver of luck life had thrown his way was that languages had always come easy. But he knew too that there was always room for improvement. Fresh idioms and nuances to be mastered. Little things that might one day make a difference.
    He gazed back into Anna-Maria’s sharp green eyes. She was beautiful. Too interesting to be called just pretty. She combed her slim fingers back through her short, raven-black hair, and smiled as he pulled her towards him, drew her through the set of thin silk curtains and laid her down on his bed.

CHAPTER THREE
23.46, KNIGHTSBRIDGE, LONDON SW7 
    From where he was still trussed up on the bed, Colonel Zykov watched as the blonde girl pulled down her knickers and urinated into the toilet.
    The bitch …
    He wanted to kill her. He’d been set up. Marked. He could see that now. Right from the start. This woman – this whore – had tricked him, and now she had him trapped.
    He could still taste the blood in his mouth. From when she’d struck him. His lungs were rattling with backed-up phlegm. and only years of training were stopping him from panicking. Training and fury and thirst for revenge.
    Whoever she was. Whatever she wanted. God damn it, he would tear out her throat.
    But what did she want? He still didn’t know. For exactly fifteen minutes now – according to the antique French clock on the bedroom wall – she’d had him at her mercy. Yet she’d not even glanced at him.
    He watched now as she stood and shamelessly wiped herself with a wad of tissue paper. She swigged from his mouthwash and spat in the sink. Only then, as she walked back into the bedroom andretrieved her handbag from the bed, did she look at him. She stared at him and slowly shook her head.
    What is it? What do you want, you crazy bitch?
    She took a phone from her handbag and made a call. She spoke a number out loud – in Russian – and the colonel’s heart sank as he recognized it as the lift’s access code, which she’d watched him type into the security panel downstairs.
    So she is not working alone . Someone else was coming for him now. Another Russian-speaker. Someone who knows where to find us .
    He cursed his own stupidity. No wonder her accent had reminded him of eastern Europe. That was exactly where she was from.
    He thought of the tiny panic button embedded in the plaster rose on the wall beside his bed. He thought of the loaded pistol in his bedside drawer. He could reach neither.
    He told himself he would survive. He had the might of his country behind him. He was a soldier. He would get through this, and then—
    My God , he thought, remembering his phone call. The phone call to the embassy she’d insisted he make. No one was expecting him at work tomorrow. No one would miss him for thirty-six hours.
    She stood and dressed. Taking his wallet from his jacket, she leafed through its contents. She took nothing. She tossed it aside.
    So she is not here to steal from me , he concluded, although far from bringing him comfort, this only increased his dread.
    Who’s coming? What will they do to me when they arrive?
    She began rummaging through his bedside drawers.
    Is there something she thinks she will find?
    He heard a drawer lock snap and then the drawer being opened.
    ‘ Samozaryadnyj Pistolet Serdjukova ,’ the girl said, weighing his gun in her hand before expertly checking its steel double-stack magazine. ‘Twenty-one-millimetre armour piercing.’
    Sitting on the edge of the bed, she jammed the pistol’s cold